Wow! What a Package!
by David Luttenberger

Roll, Roll, Roll Your Bottle -- Gently, Gently If You Please

The driver behind the success of bottled water has everything to do with marketing hype and distribution availability. Soccer moms and NASCAR dads (the latter being a real demographic Democrats are targeting in the 2004 presidential election!) have been sold on the premise that hydration is next to Godliness: Thou shalt not leave the house without a bottle of water in thy hand. I’ve yet to see anyone on the sidelines die of thirst before the end of the first period or become parched by the time Jeff Gordon has turned left 125 times.
Availability: where can’t you find bottled water? Where can’t bottled water find you? Enough said.

About the only thing that truly amazes me about the bottle water phenomenon is “consumer perception” of the product, which in my opinion has everything to do with packaging design and virtually nothing to do with product taste or quality. Let me explain, please, before you hit send with your e-mail rebuttal.

Consumers no longer demand quality in their bottled water—they expect it. Even if it is “bottled and purified at the source”—a newly discovered aquifer deep beneath Staten Island’s Fresh Kills landfill—consumers expect quality: no impurities, no “apple-like” after-taste imparted by acetaldehyde leaching.

“Eau,” how very stylish
So basically, that leaves packaging, right? Glass bottles notwithstanding, and beyond the case lots of 20-oz. Poland Spring, Dasani, and Aquafina, the array of beautifully styled and ergonomically functional PET water bottles is truly amazing. Early iterations included Fiji, the first to introduce a “square” bottle design. Energy Brands’ Glaceau Smartwater’s sleek cylinder, and Evian’s Nomad container with a ring-top carrier were marketplace hits. Then, from France we saw Mont Dore’s La Carafe, a pseudo-carafe-shaped container with an integrated “handle,” a design pleasing enough to find its way into bistros and onto consumers’ dinner tables.

Converted on a two-cavity ADS stretch blow molding machine at an intentionally low output of 1,500 bottles per hour, the blue-tinted SPA bottle is one of the more aesthetically pleasing and structurally complicated designs to hit the bottled water market recently. Molded into the front panel of the bottle is a “jumping clown,” SPA’s logo.

Now, from Belgium, comes another highly stylized package design the likes of which is more often seen among high-end liqueurs in glass decanters. Designed internally by Belgium mineral water leader Spadel, the SPA bottle is large—three liters—a size that one would think unwieldy to handle. To compensate for its weight, the container is stretch blow molded from preforms that are synchronistically heated, blown, and stretched. This precision control provides the finished bottled with strengthened lateral “ribbed” walls on two flat and two round side panels. These ribs, besides affording the container structural integrity, also allow the heavy bottle to be “rolled” instead of picked up at the point of use.

Although the concept of “rolling” seems practical for a small or even mid-size cylindrical container, on one that has both flat and rounded panels, the concept may still need refining to prevent the “rolling football” effect.

Regardless, this is a package design conceived and executed outside the realm of the norm in the water category, giving it a differentiating point-of-purchase and point-of-use “WOW” factor.

David Luttenberger, a certified packaging professional (CPP), is the director of Packaging Strategies, an intelligence briefing service for packaging markets, technologies, and businesses. He can be reached at (610) 436-4220 (ext. 18) or dluttenberger@packstrat.com.